Gabriele Colangelo

As the son of one of Italy's top furrier families, Gabriele Colangelo has had an abiding interest in fabric from the start. In the past, he's turned one painter's brushstrokes into jacquards, and used another's chunky blocks of color for a geometric print. This season, Colangelo was less interested in surface details and texture than he was in materials that hold their form. He turned to bonded fabrics with the spongy consistency of scuba gear for coats and jackets with raglan or kimono sleeves. Stripped of any adornment and featuring raw, unfinished edges and seams, the pieces had an austere sensibility. They wanted for warmth. That's where Colangelo's furs came in. He included no fewer than two dozen in the collection, some of them featuring the very latest advancements. Among the ones that stood out: minks that came with thin vertical stripes of black cross fox—inspired, he said, by Barnett Newman's canvases—and astrakhans dyed almost imperceptibly a hint of pink or lime.